"On numbers of refugees, it is illogical to ask Israel to take 5 million, or indeed 1 million. That would mean the end of Israel."
Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under George Bush, suggested in 2008 Palestinian refugees could be resettled in South America. "Maybe we will be able to find countries that can contribute in kind," she said. "Chile, Argentina, etc."
I am actually without words, beyond that exhausted phrase "without words." We live in an unspeakably ugly time.
Films of the Seventies: The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
For our screening series this quarter, Erik and I are moving on from the run-down sadism that is British horror film to - god forbid - films that are not necessarily horror films. (Many, however, will be.) Instead, we're doing the global 70s, ranging from Italy to Senegal, Mexico to Yugoslavia, West Germany to Japan. We're starting at the end of the British 60s, with a film that those who read this blog likely know by now, one of my all-time favorites, that really does not get old.
“Oh, we’ll just have to keep going?”
“What for?”
“Because we’re British.”
“British! What a lot of use that is.”
“What for?”
“Because we’re British.”
“British! What a lot of use that is.”
As an apocryphal critic pithily put it at the time of its release, Richard Lester’s post-apocalyptic film, The Bed Sitting Room, really is “like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes.” Carrying on and muddling through after the unfortunate “nuclear misunderstanding that led to the Third World War,” the twenty or so survivors in Great Britain live a salvage-filled existence as they heed well the (constantly repeated) imperative to keep moving and obliviously confront the possibility that they will suddenly mutate into animals, bed sitting rooms, and God knows what else. Nominally based on the Spike Milligan and John Antrobus play from 1963, Lester's cinematic version is a staggering vision of waste and remnant, of frozen, necrotic social relations, and of what we keep doing to keep ourselves busy after the end of the world. It is very dark, it is very uncomfortable, it is very funny, and it is very, very British. As the characters all croakingly sing apropos the closest living blood relative to the now long deceased queen, "God Save Mrs. Etheyl Shroake, Long Live Mrs. Etheyl Shroake" Not to be missed.
Tuesday, January 25th
Stevenson 150, 8 PM
For the remainder of the quarter, we will be showing 1970s films from different countries each week. Same time, same place. All are welcome. Tell your family, tell your friends.
On passing, aerial, between a set of points, several of which are friends and several of which are four-inch tall celebrities
Mid-flight from London to San Francisco:
Roughly 6 and 1/2 miles above Lac Saint Jean, I am sick of geography as fact and measure. Sick of shuttling back and forth on a moronic loom of money and distance, of the pull between friends and comrades who do not live on the same continent. Each time becomes a lose-win situation: the thought of leaving - particularly, the place where I "do not live", where I am recurring visitor but where I've lost the slight throb of the somewhat strange - saddens, the thought of arriving - where that arriving is supposedly home but is not a city as such, rather an area, a countryside linked by trains and bikes, with couches and houses, one of which is my own according to rent - feels good in spite of it all. Sick of seeing those who matter to me only as a privilege sponsored occasionally by an institution, whether that be educational, financial, or the sneering blur of the two.
Given our mutual reliance on a) variegated landscapes, b) the capacity to leave where we live, at least in name, as necessary respite, and c) the things that employ us, the "let's all move to one city" seems less than likely. Consequently, I therefore propose:
1. the immediate rearrangement of the continents into a new-Pangea glob formation of linked land-masses
2. the subsequent carving out of canals, criss-crossing the land in grids inside curves inside grids, such that water travel regains its deserved primacy
3. the retrofitting of airplanes to become large ice-runners for the winter, to ferry us back and forth across neighborhoods on 747-sized skates
4. meetings to be held out on the enormous resultant ocean that rests uneasy over the rest of the globe
Until then...
Roughly 6 and 1/2 miles above Lac Saint Jean, I am sick of geography as fact and measure. Sick of shuttling back and forth on a moronic loom of money and distance, of the pull between friends and comrades who do not live on the same continent. Each time becomes a lose-win situation: the thought of leaving - particularly, the place where I "do not live", where I am recurring visitor but where I've lost the slight throb of the somewhat strange - saddens, the thought of arriving - where that arriving is supposedly home but is not a city as such, rather an area, a countryside linked by trains and bikes, with couches and houses, one of which is my own according to rent - feels good in spite of it all. Sick of seeing those who matter to me only as a privilege sponsored occasionally by an institution, whether that be educational, financial, or the sneering blur of the two.
Given our mutual reliance on a) variegated landscapes, b) the capacity to leave where we live, at least in name, as necessary respite, and c) the things that employ us, the "let's all move to one city" seems less than likely. Consequently, I therefore propose:
1. the immediate rearrangement of the continents into a new-Pangea glob formation of linked land-masses
2. the subsequent carving out of canals, criss-crossing the land in grids inside curves inside grids, such that water travel regains its deserved primacy
3. the retrofitting of airplanes to become large ice-runners for the winter, to ferry us back and forth across neighborhoods on 747-sized skates
4. meetings to be held out on the enormous resultant ocean that rests uneasy over the rest of the globe
Until then...
Until then it's the to and fro. And, therefore, one of the accidental consequence of airplanes - or at least those that pretend to provide customized entertainment options to each and all individual snowflake/passenger, in an intravessel wrecking of the Kino Train lineage. Namely, that you cannot stop corner of the eye pseudo-watching genuinely terrible films, even as you battle to feign focus on whatever thing of quality you have in front of you. This is made worse by said films being four inches tall (i.e. centipede sized stars engaging in silent witticisms and the smallest explosions possible) and made actually unsettling by being reproduced across a field of vision on multiple monitors without being synchronized, such that without ever actually choosing to watch it, you recurrently see instances from across the duration of a film, out of order, the same scene occurring at different points in time (of your not-watching) and different points in space (first the monitor next to you, then three seats up to the left, then one to the right). You are triangulated by an awful movie. Or, in the this case of tonight, of 8 people in my immediate vicinity simultaneously watching the abhorrent slab of frozen labor that is Life As We Know It, you are frozen in an arcane pattern, somewhere near the edge of an eight-sided figure with no shape, with just the sickening familiarity of having caught that moment - where she seems to say something funny and he seems to realize that he actually loves her despite their irreconcilable difference, we know the scene- in stuttered, hiccuping multiple.
And the way this particular one ends. Our Unfuckable Hotties (note: a distinct anthropological category, increasingly common in late capitalism, namely, the toned, tanned, ripped, sprayed, dishevelled, almost coiffed, slightly next-doorish or barely exotic, one or the other, and banalized beyond the threshold of difference, such that the thought of actual erotic practice is unimaginable, other than the most Sadean excesses: why would anyone put anything into, or take into one's own body any part of, such a null, as it's a purely theoretical hotness) bound together by the child that "was not theirs", learn to kiss late in the game and become the couple they could only be by dint of shared screen time. Through struggling together, through a triangulated third coordinate and the bundle of libido placed on it (which we imagine will ultimately overwhelm it until it is warped into the child of It's Alive), carrying in the tray of cupcakes to the welcoming neighborhood, now successfully a Two to join the rest of the yummy mummies and the tamed sexy dads. And the camera tracks backwards out the front door and swerves up, retreating on a vertical axis from the house, to reveal the trees and green surrounding it, before tilting back and pivoting left, slightly askew, to reveal the City at a distance, rising up from the tree canopy of the suburbs, that other place where they don't belong, for which they won't yearn, close enough to be spurned, near enough for the frisson, far enough from the filth, ready to do sit ups, giggle at the tribulations of child rearing, and spit into each others gaping mouths for the idiot decades to follow.
The very small screen reverts back to the air map. For a moment it loses its signal and shows a line of red traced, and a dotted white line of the path ahead, against a flat black. A coordinateless swamp that does not understand geography. Then it snaps back into configuration, and I see I am halfway from London, halfway to California, 2942 miles to San Francisco, 2401 from London, moving 588 miles per hour while 34,997 feet above the ground.
A hurtling point on a pyramid, casting a diffusing cone of vision from one small rectangle of light to another, tracing a set of lines to those from whom I go, to whom I come. While a meaty child cries and shits itself somewhere nearby, dull people who are not my friends smack their lips, and all space must be collapsed, everywhere and nowhere, none at once.
Banquet of the Black Jackal
If you're in LA, check this show out. Haven't seen yet, but some of my writing is in the catalogue, the group of artists is terrific, and the title is pretty sharp. (Will be contributing to another thing Adam is doing soon as well.)
BANQUET OF THE BLACK JACKAL
What happens when mankind ends? How will history, cultural objects, and relationships between the elements be remembered or reinterpreted? The artists in this exhibition tackle the notion of history—be it personal, cultural or philosophic—in their multimedia installations. The questions at play in this exhibition are informed by the writings of Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève and contemporary science fiction.
Participating artists: Eduardo Consuegra, Adam D. Miller, Ruby Neri, Devon Oder, Amanda Ross-Ho, Liz Craft, Shio Kusaka, and Matthew Greene
The opening reception for Banquet of the Black Jackal will be from 6-8pm on Saturday, January 22.
exhibition curated by Adam D. Miller
exhibition runs from January 22 – March 19. Gallery hours monday-thursday & saturday noon to 5pm. Gallery closed on friday and sunday.
exhibition runs from January 22 – March 19. Gallery hours monday-thursday & saturday noon to 5pm. Gallery closed on friday and sunday.
A catalog has been published to accompany the exhibition with essays by Adam D Miller, Mark Von Shlegell, Lia Cheyenne Trinker Browner and Evan Calder Williams. Hand silk-screened covers, and full-color artist pages. Please bring a couple bucks to the opening to get a copy.
The Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA, 90032
California State University, Los Angeles
323-343-6600
http://www.luckmanarts.org
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA, 90032
California State University, Los Angeles
323-343-6600
http://www.luckmanarts.org
Buddha's Goat Herd
As unhinged good as it seems. (Part of the ongoing conviction that all should stop arguing about whether or not Avatar or anything of its ilk is subversive - hint: if it costs that much and makes that much and has been calculated to be too big to fail as it was, then it ain't - and watch things like this, which are messy and inventive.
Yet another object lesson in why partisans should not give up the fight/arms/process of undoing social order because the old powers-that-be have been kicked out. (Especially when those old powers include Orson Welles, in grease paint, at his most hooch-swollen, his lidded eyes nearly swallowed by the rest of his face, itself threatened by his looming sleepy collapse.)
And yes, there is that sheer perversity of a anti-colonial struggle that employs livestock as IEDs. Unlike My Name is Nobody, where the baddies load their saddlebags with their own shootable doom (the master's tools of repurposed gold mining used to get gold without digging are then then turned against them with a few well placed bullets), Tepepa and crew here produce an explosive swarm to be urged up a road with sticks toward the caravan to be destroyed, goaded into explosive retribution, bells a-clangin'.
I have not been writing words because I have been talking them until my tongue is thick with the leftover of things said. This to be rectified soon.
I am leaving soon, four days, after the quieter time after a more wild winter, before things look to ramp up in weeks to come. So the time I've been here has seemed a coalescence, a gathering itself up for those weeks ahead. That said, still struck from earlier tonight: in the EMA march, a single line of sight back from ten yards ahead caught, at once, a set of mouths, the same neon green worn by march stewards and the line of police four steps ahead, the worn chant WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS, and the fact of a cop rolling tranquilly ahead on the motorcycle that was leading the way for the march on those very streets. The jelly-thick medium in which no particle movement is possible.
Worse, the fact that this is only worse because it reveals what is generally the case. I understand in full that no one wants to be "responsible" for the kettling/beating of high school kids nor should such an outcome be invited or produced. Understand more in full that such a category of responsibility has to be entirely run off the road, right with its slow-rolling pace-bike, and fast, if things are to fall apart better.
I am leaving soon, four days, after the quieter time after a more wild winter, before things look to ramp up in weeks to come. So the time I've been here has seemed a coalescence, a gathering itself up for those weeks ahead. That said, still struck from earlier tonight: in the EMA march, a single line of sight back from ten yards ahead caught, at once, a set of mouths, the same neon green worn by march stewards and the line of police four steps ahead, the worn chant WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS, and the fact of a cop rolling tranquilly ahead on the motorcycle that was leading the way for the march on those very streets. The jelly-thick medium in which no particle movement is possible.
Worse, the fact that this is only worse because it reveals what is generally the case. I understand in full that no one wants to be "responsible" for the kettling/beating of high school kids nor should such an outcome be invited or produced. Understand more in full that such a category of responsibility has to be entirely run off the road, right with its slow-rolling pace-bike, and fast, if things are to fall apart better.
The Cussedness of Objects: Saturday the 22
UPDATE: Space is all filled up. We have a waiting list in case anyone cancels, so feel free to write regarding this, but we're overpacked as is...
AT XERO, KLINE & COMA
The Cussedness of Objects is part of an ongoing dialogue between Evan Calder Williams of Socialism and/or Barbarism and Marina Vishmidt, writer and researcher at Queen Mary University, that started with hostile objects and has since opened more broadly onto commodity fetishism from the perspective of the commodity, recodings and "misuses" of the city (from occupations to barricades), reification theory, socialist animism, and, above all, the strange fates and promises of a built world alternately murderous, feeble, and indifferent.
The discussion will be followed by a screening of The Man in the White Suit.
Places are very limited so, R.S.V.P. to participate and for links to relevant reading.
London dates
Initial schedule for my next ten days in London. Come join at any and all. (Not included, but up soon, is an event on commodities murderous, feeble, and indifferent, fetishism from the object's side of things, socialist animism, etc, with M. Vishmidt and others. Will post once we pin down a place and time.)
Talking about pseudo-science, coming undone, and the warm, slightly mushy, fetid breath of extinction
(talking about usury, meat and coinage, real abstractions, the way in which credit is like or not like a sleepless work-cow)
(with winner of the most sublimely ugly poster, up there on an Asger Jorn
meets Cheech and Chong hybrid level)
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY: Art Against Cuts, two day workshop. I'll chat history of sabotage
MONDAY: Alberto, Daniele, and I screening and discussing one of the greatest political films of the 70s (and the 20th century more broadly), Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven
THURSDAY (the 20th): Theory Research Group, down at Chichester
Hostile Object Theory, in fully expanded form
A schematic affair, a shadow-creature, that could not live of itself
It was impossible to say whether she was listening or not. She would take her slate pencil in her hand but no amount of coaxing would persuade her to exercise up-strokes or down-strokes and the formation of whole letters was altogether out of the question. If she used her slate at all it was to draw some monstrous beast with ten legs or a face with three eyes and two noses.
One of the best entire novel in a single day instances I've had in a very long while. The downside is the painful wrenching back into accordance with our gray times, given that the rest of the world does not accord with the linguistic tendencies of decadent pre-WWI horror fiction concerned with the unholy androgynous daughter born of the semen of a hanged man and a whore with no "instinctive remnant of the feeling of kinship to society," a daughter whose murderous influence extends only to the ruling classes. And that is a damn shame, 100 years on from the printed appearance of the book.
Hence, to mark its centennial, time for an immediate flooding of the written world order with utterly shameless prose about the "sweet toxin of sin borne aloft by the sirocco." (Not to mention a committed insistence on talking endlessly about body parts and how sexy they are, but doing so - i.e. describing breasts as white kittens "just born, lifting their little pink snouts into the air" - that leaves us quite unclear as to what the hell sex is supposed to be.)
The best sky hook to date
And who could ever say
That sports do not provide
Real world skills
[thanks, J, for image]
Critique of Murderous, Blithering, Moronic Reason
Dear Peter Sloterdijk,
Hey, remember that book you wrote back in '87? That was a great one: funny, acerbic, rambling, sharp. I had wished for more like it.
Now, though:
"In an earlier day the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones--though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still."
You should have your fingers and mouth taken from you, so that you can neither write nor speak. You are an unconscionable jackass.
S a/o B
Fluffy, inertial, clumsy, and bearlike materialism (Bruno Schulz describes one version of the gesture in modern art)
"We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion. If they be human beings, we shall give them, for example, only one profile, one hand, one leg, the one limb needed for their role. It would be pedantic to bother about the other, unnecessary, leg Their backs can be made of canvas or simply whitewashed. We shall have this proud slogan as our aim: a different actor for every gesture. For each action, each word, we shall call to life a different human being. Such is our whim, and the world will be run according to our pleasure. The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.
"Can you understand," asked my father, "the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mâché, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is," he continued with a pained smile," the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness."
The girls sat motionless, with glazed eyes.
(Schulz, "Tailors' Dummies")
For in all battles the eyes are vanquished first
"by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish"
Tacitus, on the Germanic "ghost warriors" the harii. (Who, by the way, are what Simek calls "the obviously living armies of the dead," the historical, black-clad, flesh and blood foundation for the mythic conception of the Einherjar.)
Alternate histories of special effects, lightless guerilla warfare, the trompe l'oeil such that the night itself will rout the empire. A haunted house theater of operations / of cruelty.
Yes, that is a butterfly painted on my cheek, and yes, those are metal fingerclaw extensions
NYC in 1990, in the eyes of Italy in 1982, was just one of those years.
The gutter dwelling offspring of an Argento objects on the killer's desk tracking shot, The Warriors, and least heterosexual aspects of Mad Max.
Knives - and rollerskates - out...
Sursurrealism
Les barricadeurs sur
la police sur
la ville
(That is, if you want us, cops, you'll have to shoot at your a single phrase version of your fundamental fantasy first. In the Dresden uprising of 1849, so the story goes, Bakunin, proposed to hang Raphael's Sistine Madonna from the barricades, as he thought the Prussians were too cultured "to dare to fire on a Raphael." The French police firing on an American cop film - starring Richard Widmark, no less - is about as unthinkable.
For contemporary America: we must build movable walls composed of nothing but reruns of The Shawshank Redemption. No one will touch us.)
See for yourself pedagogy
When teachers talk about making sacrifices and throwing themselves, heart and soul, into their craft, call em on their bluff: demand that their bodies follow. This is commitment.
"It is really terrible, but it is part of education sometimes. Unfortunately, they must deal with it," she said.
Let's open it up for discussion, so to speak.
(appropriately, this story came to me from my adviser, who - for his own safety - should perhaps not be encouraging this line of thinking)
"It is important that an autopsy truly be the educational opportunity that it should be. The question is how much these students learned from the situation," she added.
"It is the story of Everyman: the reclaiming of Self. "
Amazon's evident hostility to my forthcoming book - or their attempt to help it reach audiences who otherwise might never pick up something about naked boys throwing themselves into fires for the good of the species - has led to a seriously unbelievable product misdescription.
"true success comes from following the heart's lead, and that the mind only creates form for spirit's creative manifestation."
As for how Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is to be confused with Dee Wallace's Bright Light: Spiritual Lessons from a Life of Acting is utterly, utterly beyond me. In fairness, I request only that her product description be swapped out for mine...
"The apocalypse isn't something that will happen one day: it's just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we've been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come."
But sure, if by "spirit's creative manifestation," you mean the fall of 1,000 blackbirds, then yes.
"Since it only involved a flock of blackbirds and only involved them falling out of the sky, it is unlikely they were poisoned"
Only involved...
If you skin a wolf (Living mammals, gnawing mammals)
though it can chew very rotten meat and / newly born animals. It is nowhere common.
---
If you skin a wolf, coyote and a domestic dog, you / would be hard put to it to identify any one of them / even if you were an anatomist.
Confusion arises / from the fact that dogs in the wide sense of that term / have gone and head and developed what we may call / "nations" without changing in appearance very much.
To add to their charm, these little creatures make pa- / thetic whimpering noises when alarmed.
When seen alive its proportions are hardly / believable and must surely have been developed for / getting through or between things
and we would like to know more about it.
---
all forms of unpleasant hangers-on - a result of their / habit of following the large cats, making a special noise / when doing so, and then eating up most of the feast as / soon as the cat's back is turned.
for their appalling call which, in the case / of the Indian race is said to be "Dead Hindoo . . . / where, where, where?"
---
They will all interbreed with do- / mestic dogs, other jackals, or even wolves
there is a colossal mix-up of doggy creatures.
Hopping, gnawing, scheming
it is necessary to take a deep breath, metaphori- / cally, speaking, for this is the largest order
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